[photonthug]

> my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.

And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

One possible explanation for stuff like this is that you’re dealing with someone that has an anti-realist meta-ethic, which is not so unusual, but what is new is the blurred boundary between factual questions and ethical questions. Something like “Fair election?” would seem to be a clear and concrete question about the world, but the answer you’d get is always for a different question, and so it amounts to boo or hurrah. Even asking a simpler question about a specific policy changing or staying the same cannot untangle the discourse if that question is perceived as too close to an ethical one.

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism , etc.

[smeej]

> And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

It actually wasn't even rejection. It was this pivot to, "You live in a different moral reality than I do, and therefore your assessment of factual reality is morally bankrupt," even though I thought we were talking about whether the law had changed, not the moral value of a change.

It got ugly really fast, and frankly I'm still bewildered by it. It would have been one thing if he didn't think there was a reality to appeal to. This was just, "You have a fact I don't like, and therefore are evil."